Freudism and Psychiatry in the Comunist Culture. 1949, Buenos Aires and Paris

Abstract

In 1949, La Nouvelle Critique, the French Communists' intellectual magazine, published a harsh critique of psychoanalysis. This was reproduced in Buenos Aires the same year by Gregorio Bermann in Nueva Gaceta, a journal belonging to the Argentine Communist Party circle and directed by Héctor Agosti. In the setting of the Cold War, psychoanalysis was located among the ideological expressions of capitalism, serving the American worldwide offensive. In France, that crusade lasted only a few years. By the early sixties, Louis Althusser renewed Marxist thought and the reading of Freud and, in 1964, he published "Freud et Lacan" in the same magazine, La Nouvelle Critique. In Buenos Aires, however, the war against Freudianism lasted at least until the end of the sixties. This article discusses the inaugural moment of that historical time and it studies the relations and misunderstandings in the reception of this controversy given the local conditions of the communist culture.